Packajoozle for GNU Octave

Packajoozle is a re-working of Octave’s pkg package management tool to use OOP. It provides the pkj command, a drop-in replacement for pkg.

I started this as just a fun exercise, but it kind of got out of hand, and now it’s almost a real, usable package.

Requirements

• Octave 4.4.1 or later

New features

Compared to Octave’s pkg, Packajoozle’s pkj also provides:

• Versioned Forge package installation
  • Installation of a selected version instead of just the latest
  • Installation of multiple versions side-by-side
• More metadata available from Octave Forge
• Capturing of package build logs
• A pkj test command for running package unit tests
• A pkj review command to quality check Forge package distributions before publishing

Installation

pkg install https://github.com/apjanke/octave-packajoozle/archive/master.zip
pkg load packajoozle

Usage

Use the pkj function like you would Octave’s pkg function. That's Packajoozle's version of it. It supports all the calling forms that pkg does, and more.

See help pkj for details. Though the help and documentation is pretty lacking right now. Sorry about that.

pkj supports additional features:

Versioned installation

You can specify a particular version of a package foo by appending @<version> to its name. The <version> can be a specific version, or <operator><version> where <operator> is one of the compare_versions operators (<, <=, ==, !=, >=, or >).

Examples:

>> pkj install -forge io@2.4.10
>> pkj install -forge financial@<0.5.0

When you have multiple versions of a package installed, the same version selectors can be used with pkj load to choose which one gets loaded.

When you use < or > selectors instead of a specific version for install or load, pkj will choose the most recent version that meets all your specified criteria. For example, if you did pkj install -forge io@<1.2, it would pick forge 1.0.20, because that’s the most recent version that is still less than 1.2.0.

Things to try

Here’s some stuff Packajoozle can do.

% What's available on Octave Forge?
pkj list -forge     % This is 40x faster than Octave's `pkg list -forge`!
pkj list -forge -listversions statistics

% Want to test multiple versions?
pkj install -forge statistics@1.4.0 statistics@1.3.0 statistics@1.2.4
pkj load statistics@1.3.0

You can also do pkj test <package> to run the tests in a package, but I haven’t been able to find any Octave Forge packages which actually have tests.

Compatibility with Octave pkg

Packajoozle pkj is pretty well compatible with pkg.

The pkj command is back-compatible with the pkg command at the interface level. Generally, any pkg ... command you run will do the same thing when you run it as pkj ... instead. It’s just that pkj supports more commands, options, and package specifier forms over and above what pkg does, so more things will work in pkj than pkg.

Packajoozle uses the same package directory structure, installation locations, and index/metadata file formats that pkg does. This means that packages installed by pkj are visible to pkj, and vice versa. The one big exception here is versioning: pkg does not support multiple versioned installations of a given package, even though its index file supports it. This means that if you install multiple versions of a single package using pkj, they will all be visible to pkj, and the newest ones will be visible to pkg, and everyone will be happy. But then if you install a package using pkg (or do something else that causes it to update the package index file), pkg will wipe out all the “duplicate” old versions of the package, leaving only the latest version. The older versions of the package will then disappear to both pkg and pkj.

Packajoozle uses a superset of the Octave Forge metadata that pkg does. Generally, they will see the same state of Octave Forge; it’s just that pkj knows more details about it, like full listings of versions for a given Forge package. Also, pkj does caching, so it may take a couple hours for Octave Forge updates to make their way down to pkj clients. But that shouldn’t be a big deal, given how seldom Octave Forge packages receive updates.

Requirements

• Octave 4.4.0 or newer

Code organization

The main user interface to Packajoozle is the command-style function pkj.

All the stuff in +internal namespaces is undocumented stuff for Packajoozle’s internal use, and may change at any time. Don’t code against it. There’s nothing in the main +packajoozle namespace right now, but I’m planning on eventually moving some stuff there and making it part of the public API, to support programmatic use of Packajoozle.

Internal changes

Internally, Packajoozle has reworked the Octave pkg code to move most of the logic into OOP classes. The goal is to make it feasible to test small units of its functionality individually, and make it easier to handle complex data structures like version specifiers. I’d also like to provide an OOP API to make it easier for developers to script Packajoozle operations; the pkj interface is clumsy, and intended for end user interaction, both in terms of its interface design and its output behavior.

Authors

Packajoozle is written and maintained by Andrew Janke.